[Year 12 SofDev] Records and Arrays

[David Dawson]

I do not mean to be insubordinate but I think we probably should give
students a little history to "records" if we are going to identify these
with specific definitions.
I believe that records were used originally to store data in files -
prior to database stores where special files are used to store records -
these files of records reflect reasonably well what databases do more
effectively. Hence, I am quite curious as to why we will no longer use
SQL databases in a language like PHP. I need to ask - are we actually
regressing.
What is the actual reasoning that occurred which led to this change in
the Software Development course?
Perhaps someone can explain how this change is a "progression" or an
advance over the old programming course.

This is an interesting piece from Wikipedia and relates to modern
languages, classes, objects and "records" :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Record_(computer_science)
"An object in object-oriented language is essentially a record that
contains procedures specialized to handle that record; and object data
types (often called object classes) are an elaboration of record types.
Indeed, in most object-oriented languages, records are just special
cases of objects.

Records were well established in the first half of the 20th century,
when most data processing was done using punched cards. Typically each
records of a data file would be recorded in one punched card, with
specific columns assigned to specific fields. .... COBOL was the first
widespread programming language to support record types ... The Pascal
programming language was one of the first languages to fully integrate
record types with other basic types into a logically consistent type
system. IBM's PL/1 programming language provided for COBOL-style
records. The C programming language initially provided the record
concept as a kind of template (struct) that could be laid on top of a
memory area, rather than a true record data type."

 
 
 
David Dawson
Head of Information Technology Learning Area
Head of Learning Technologies
St Kilda Rd Campus
Wesley College 
577 St Kilda Rd
Melbourne 3004
Ph 8102 6340
Mob 0425 718147

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